There is a reason the French coined joie de vivre and the Italians answered with dolce far niente — the sweetness of doing nothing, or at least nothing that looks like work. The Spanish, characteristically, skipped the philosophy and just made paella.
Our Brooklyn garden last month was somewhere in that tradition. Not a dinner party in any uptight Anglo sense — no seating plan, no courses arriving in nervous succession. Just a long table, a warm night, and two enormous pans.
The table looked like a market stall in Palermo or a bar top in San Sebastián — rattan baskets of heirloom tomatoes, bowls of lemons, the Vito jug doing duty as a vase, Akila candleholders, dried orange slices sitting in the August bowls until the cocktail hour came for them.
Paella started as a farmhand's lunch — rice cooked over open fire in the fields outside Valencia, whatever came to hand thrown in. Rabbit, beans, snail. The pan wide and flat so the rice could spread thin, catch the heat, form the socarrat — the caramelised crust at the bottom that Valencians will tell you is the whole point. Somewhere along the way it acquired seafood, saffron, and the rest of the world's attention. It was always a dish meant to be set down in the middle and left there. Arroces Street Paella made two — one traditional seafood with prawns and octopus, one miso-based vegan.
Pudding was Basque burnt cheesecake, three of them from Little Grace Bakery, made that morning and gone by ten. Rumour has it the original was an accident — a chef in San Sebastián in 1990 who pulled something from the oven that looked, by every conventional measure, ruined. Darkened top, molten centre, no crust to speak of. He served it anyway. La Viña has been serving it ever since, and the rest of the world spent the following three decades catching up.
Thanks to Elly Leavitt for articulating the evening so beautifully, to Arroces Street Paella for the finger-licking dish itself, to our guitarrista for the soundtrack, and to Holiday Vodka and Chandon for never once letting a glass run dry.
If all this has left you wanting a long table of your own, we recommend starting with Agua de Valencia and a fresh set of linens.
